Pause in Blog

Whether permanent or not, this blog is now combined with my other one Alchemy of Clay. http://blackmtnbarb.blogspot.com/ go there, and then follow me over there. The personal and genealogical archives, and Black Mountain NC scenery and my potting life are combined. It's a good thing.

Monday, August 18, 2014

Surviving

Living in Appalachia, I run into a few Preppers now and then. That's someone prepared to survive the Armageddon of some attack, or more likely the doomsday from environmental chaos. They speak of themselves as Preppers (which isn't in spell check yet!) But they have a web site and newsletter, as well as the magazine Survival.

They even have computers that are designed to survive an EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse.) EMP is the end of our civilization as we know it, without bombs. Of course it means all our technology stops at the same time, so I'm not sure why the Preppers have computers that could survive. No electricity, (cept your batteries for a while), no cars, no planes, (unless they are designed before computers were in them.)

Anyway, why did I bring them up? I'm watching a Netflix series from BBC called "Survivors." I had watched some of the post-apocalyptic TV shows made in the US, but not any from England before. I soon lost interest in the US mainstream TV versions. Same old soap opera or cowboy stuff just in a different environment. Not really dealing with survival issues. So far Survivors has presented some of the realistic problems, but they have some coincidences that are pretty strange. The few people who survived the epidemic somehow all come together...and all kinds of deaths seem to be so sudden people are still sitting in waiting room chairs at the hospital. Not many fires or explosions (yet) which were prevalent after Katrina in New Orleans.

Anyway, I get to turn it off whenever I get stressed. That's part of why I watch it. Much easier to deal with than the real life environmental stresses, or the way people are really treating people on the news each evening. I haven't watched a TV for a year and a month. I do watch news on the computer every once in a while, if there's something happening in which I'm interested. Otherwise, my stress level has been greatly reduced, and nothing happening in the world would have been affected one bit by my watching those gory details.